400m lack access to essential health services, says WHO/World Bank report

A World Health Organization and World Bank Group report that was released yesterday showed that 400 million people do not have access to essential health services.

The report projected that 6 per cent of people in low- and middle-income countries are tipped into or pushed further into extreme poverty because of health spending.

Senior Director of Health, Nutrition and Population at the World Bank Group, Dr. Tim Evans, stated: “This report is a wakeup call: It shows that we’re a long way from achieving universal health coverage.

We must expand access to health and protect the poorest from health expenses that are causing them severe financial hardship.”

The report, which is tilted: “Tracking Universal Health Coverage”,according to the World Bank, was the first to measure health service coverage and financial protection to assess countries’ progress towards universal health coverage.

“The world’s most disadvantaged people are missing out on even the most basic services.

A commitment to equity is at the heart of universal health coverage. Health policies and programmes should focus on providing quality health services for the poorest people, women and children, people living in rural areas and those from minority groups,” WHO’s Assistant Director-General, Health Systems and Innovation, Dr. Marie-Paule Kieny explained.

The latest report xamined global access to essential health services—including family planning, antenatal care, skilled birth attendance, child immunization, antiretroviral therapy, tuberculosis treatment, and access to clean water and sanitation—in 2013, and found that at least 400 million people lacked access to at least one of these services.

The finding of the report revealed that across 37 countries, 6 per cent of the population was tipped or pushed further into extreme poverty ($1.25/day) because they had to pay for health services out of their own pockets.

When the study factored in a poverty measure of $2/day, 17 per cent of people in these countries were impoverished, or further impoverished, by health expenses.

“These high levels of impoverishment, which happen when poor people have to pay out of pocket for their own emergency health care, pose a major threat to the goal of eliminating extreme poverty.

As we transition to a post-2015 development era, we must act on these findings, or the world’s poor risk being left behind,”  Senior Vice President and Chief Economist at the World Bank Group, Dr. Kaushik Basu cautioned.

WHO and the World Bank Group recommend that countries pursuing universal health coverage should aim to achieve a minimum of 80% population coverage of essential health services, and that everyone everywhere should be protected from catastrophic and impoverishing health payments.

“As more countries make commitments to universal health coverage, one of the major challenges they face is how to track progress,” says Dr. Ties Boerma, Director of the Department of Health Statistics and Information Systems at the World Health Organization.